Welcome to the High Stakes World of Color and Branding

Color is big business for fashion companies. Because color influences buyer choice, and must be decided upon months before an item shows up at retail, the wrong palette can leave a company with millions of dollars in undesirable merchandize.

A new J. Crew video showing the effort the company's "color creators" put into researching and manufacturing"45 custom coat colors" a season has gotten a lot of attention lately. Though we at Esquire aren't convinced that J. Crew is actually "creating" those colors, because it would take a shitload of extra time, money, and expertise to make a new custom color system rather than using an existing one like Pantone, the video remains illustrative.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

A recent infographic that broke on Finances Online confirms this, showing that even non-fashion-related companies like Pepsi are willing to throw down some serious cash on logos that perfectly balance hues like passionate red and comforting blue to convey a strong emotional message. The same piece pointed that Apple's successful late '90s resurgence was spurred in part by changing the company's eponymous logo from dated rainbow stripe to cool grey, a monochrome emblem recently deemed the most valuable in the world at a worth of $104.3 billion.

For these reasons, color forecasting is at the core of fashion consulting, and the best in the field make big money. The Gap recently bet its future on a color forecaster, naming Rebekka Bay creative director. Danish-born Bay notes that she struggled at first, presenting a palette that Gap's designers read as "murky, moody, European" before she acclimatized to a clean, bright American palette.

Recent research from Asia indicates that indeed, leaving these momentous decisions to mere humans might not be the most effective way to predict color trends. A paper by researchers at the Institute of Textiles and Clothing at Hong Kong Polytechnic University found that due in part to the accelerated production schedule of fast fashion, color forecasting that "depends on the personal experience and judgment of the field of experts… is often found underperforming," while "artificial intelligence models, especially artificial neural network and fuzzy logic models… help to improve the forecasting of fashion color trends."

Which means, that fuzzy logic or not, color and all that it conveys is one last thing that the smart robots will shortly be stealing from our cold, dead, damn hands.